British acoustic 12-string guitarist James Blackshaw has been celebrated as an innovator on his instrument since he first arrived on the scene with Celeste in 2004 -- it was released in a CD-R edition of 80 copies. Blackshaw knocked out five more releases in the ensuing four years, all of which have been reissued on New York's wonderful Tompkins Square imprint, a label that has devoted itself to classic and outsider music since its inception. Blackshaw, who was deeply influenced by the late Robbie Basho, has found his own path through use of unusual and custom-created tunings based on both Eastern and Western scales, but has also been throwing a few curve balls in the last few years -- most notably the use of electronics, dissonance, and the beautifully stretched harmonics of violinist/violist Fran Bury on the brilliant Cloud of Unknowing release from 2007. Bury returns here but in a very different capacity on the mutant classical repetitions of Gate of Ivory, playing both violin and viola on the bookend tracks on the album. The strains of the lower instrument are used as a drone against Blackshaw's piano. His hammering, repetitive, and choppy phraseology is accented and droned upon underneath and through by Bury for five and a half minutes in a piece that, while derived from Philip Glass and Steve Reich, goes so much further because of the overtones on viola. On Gate of Horn, the same phrase is used by Blackshaw's piano -- both cuts are close in length to one another -- and Bury uses the higher instrument this time out, screeching into its high register à la Warren Ellis of the Dirty Three. But that dissonance, covered as it is by the piano's constant pulsing rhythm, never quite turns ugly. In fact, it is transcendentally beautiful.

1		Gate of Ivory
2		Past Has Not Passed
3		Echo And Abyss
4		Infinite Circle
5		Shroud
6		Gate of Horn